Lately, life has been unnaturally calm for vampires Cat Crawfield and her husband Bones. They should have known better than to relax their guard, because a shocking revelation sends them back into action to stop an all-out war…

A rogue CIA agent is involved in horrifying secret activities that threaten to raise tensions between humans and the undead to dangerous heights. Now Cat and Bones are in a race against time to save their friends from a fate worse than death… because the more secrets they unravel, the deadlier the consequences. And if they fail, their lives—and those of everyone they hold dear — will be hovering on the edge of the grave.

I’m disappointed.

I love this series. Like, top ten must-read series love. And Up from the Grave is the last book. I wanted that 5-star mind-blowing end to the adventures of Cat and Bones. Instead, I had a satisfying but lackluster finale. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed book 7 but it had its issues.

Issue numero uno: the plot. WTF Frost? Talk about predictable. You cut out the best part of this series — the characters — and substitute a remarkably similar story to Breaking Dawn from the Twilight series (EDIT: Perused reviews after posting this. Thank goodness I’m not the only one who noticed the resemblance.) There’s a red-headed super-vamp lab experiment running rampant and *shocker* it’s Cat’s kid. I’d mark it as a spoiler but it’s clear from the start. Katie (the kid) shouldn’t even have existed. That was the whole deal with Cat’s vamp-ness. No kids, and to be honest, it worked with her and Bones. They didn’t need one to make them a complex character duo. Yet like in many of the paranormal romances I’ve read, the series isn’t complete until the heroine has a kid.

Let’s take this trope and destroy. Okay? Okay.

It played right into the HEA (Happily Ever After) syndrome Up from the Grave suffers from. I love happy endings. They’re great. But this book wrapped things up too neatly. Everyone got what they wanted and the bad guys lost. Well isn’t that lovely. Wake me up when something realistic happens.

BUT it wasn’t all bad. The last book of an action-packed series should have action, right? It delivered on that front, over and over. In fact, I think there was more going on in this book than the last two books combined. The characters all came back (even the one-line mentions from early books) to close out the series, and some of the much-loved Cat/Bones dynamic lingered, though it could’ve done with a power-up.

I’ll always love Bones.

No matter the problems I had with this book, I will always remain a huge fan of the Night Huntress series and I sense future re-reads, especially with the spin-off Vlad series. I’m also grateful Frost ended it when she did as too many series continue and burn out after so many books (looking at you, Stephanie Plum).